Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum (15 page)

This sudden
increase in activity was a warning sign for what was to come. As
Christmas 1868 approached, two patients were still missing after
their escapes, and their loss would have begun to make the
Broadmoor hierarchy uncomfortable. At the time, it was obvious to
those in charge that they had made the wrong choice back in 1865.
After the escapes of Bennett, Douglas and Thompson, Meyer summed up
the situation: ‘The Council have long been aware that the cast iron
bars and window frames which existed 6 years ago throughout the
buildings were most insecure, and the evil has been remedied in
Blocks 1 and 6 in which the windows have all been secured with
wrought iron bars...there remain however 784 windows not yet
secured...Mr Jarvis, the clerk of works, estimates the expense at
£1100 and believes that the work might be completed in 2 months’.
He asked the Council of Supervision for permission to carry it out
immediately. The Council agreed, but the price was a significant
sum, and they had to ask the Home Office for the money. It was
forthcoming in December 1868.

Inevitably,
there would be a period of time before the works could be
completed. This delay in rectifying a design fault was about to
cause the Asylum what became, in retrospect, its first real
embarrassment. Another patient was about to take advantage of the
opportunity offered by the defective bars. On Christmas Eve 1868,
David McLane became the first Broadmoor patient to escape, and to
never be heard from again.

As last time,
the escape was from a single room on the first floor of Block 4. To
remove his cross bar, McLane used two pieces of metal from old
locks, and a piece of wood to steady the pressure. Correctly
applied, he had managed to turn the bolt in the window frame;
taking additional advantage of the fact that one of the retaining
screws in the frame was later found to be faulty. Nobody was sure
exactly what route once he was out of the window, but it seems
probable that he managed to follow the roof line round the lower
level of the admin block, reach the Gatehouse and then drop down
outside. McLane had gone to bed at seven o’clock on Christmas Eve,
and was not missed until twenty-five to eight on Christmas morning,
by which time he was, presumably, long gone. There were no
inspection windows in the doors of Block 4 at the time, and as far
as the attendants were concerned, all the lunatics were sleeping
peacefully on Christmas night.

McLane was a
violent offender, a rapist, convicted at Durham in 1863 and
sentenced to eight years in jail. Moved from Wakefield Prison to
Millbank, he had begun to hear voices in his cell, and also
believed that he was under the power of electricity, used upon him
by forces unknown. The development of technology is felt in
delusions just as much as in the real world, and McLane was an
early sufferer from the same electric currents that would affect
many other Victorian patients. Despite his delusions, McLane was
first placed in the privilege Block 5, where he was well behaved
and industrious. It was only when he attacked a fellow patient in
1866 that he was moved to Block 4.

It seems that
in the days leading up to his escape, McLane had been the fortunate
beneficiary of a lapse in good practice: he had obtained clothing
and boots without these being checked out to him properly, and had
stored them in his room for when the time came. If the rules had
been followed, then McLane would have escaped in only his
nightshirt, like Richard Walker before. A half-naked man in the
depths of winter may well have given himself up if he had been
unable to find clothing outside. A fully clothed lunatic had
already gained an important advantage. The Block’s senior member of
staff was severely reprimanded for his lack of oversight.

Delusional or
not, McLane had evidently well-planned his escape: apart from the
clothes, he had been spotted the previous two mornings removing
himself early from breakfast to go and look out of his window –
presumably to survey his route - but no relevance had been attached
to his actions. McLane’s fate remains a mystery: his sentence
expired in the summer of 1871, and he was written off the Asylum
books the following year.

The horse had
gone, but the stable door was bolted when the ironworks on the
windows in Blocks 2, 3, 4 and 5 were replaced in early 1869. This
removed one of the principal methods of escape entirely, and
henceforth, any attempt to escape from inside a block would have to
be considerably more complex. There remained, though, another small
window of opportunity within the fabric of the complex, that of the
Asylum’s boundary wall, and it would be from here that the only
woman to be lost for good made her way out on 27th July 1869.

Alice Kaye
(alternatively known as Ellen Cook) was a thirty year-old factory
worker from Bolton, with a partner and three children. Existing
close to the poverty line, she had been convicted of stealing
clothing in 1864 when living in Salford and given four months
imprisonment; then, when she was caught stealing a pair of boots
and two gold rings in 1866, she was given seven years inside. Sent
from Salford jail to Brixton, alleged to be feigning insanity, she
was removed to Broadmoor in March 1868 suffering from delusions
that she was the Queen. In the Asylum, she had generally worked
hard in the laundry and on the ward, and not presented many
problems.

At seven
o’clock on the evening in question, Alice and roughly twenty-five
other women were in the airing court of the new, additional female
block. In the old block, the Asylum band was playing, and the
female attendants in the new one were listening, some of them
dancing with the patients. Sensing an opportunity, Kaye and another
patient made their way towards the north boundary wall of the
Asylum. This wall had rather been neglected while security had been
improved on the male side. There had not been an attempted escape
from the female wing since Mary McBride, five years ago. Now Kaye
did what McBride had done. She got a leg up and a push, and she was
over the wall and away. She was only noticed missing when the band
had finished playing, and it was time to go back in. Like in
McLane’s case, this was too late, and the vital minutes had given
her ample opportunity to secret herself in rural East
Berkshire.

Her
description – brown hair, brown eyes, five foot one – was
circulated to the Metropolitan and the Bolton police, and unlike
McLane, there was also a lead to follow up. Kaye had developed a
close friendship with an attendant, who had briefly worked in
Broadmoor a few months earlier, called Isabella Saby. Saby had,
apparently, given Kaye an address in London and asked her to come
and see her ‘on the outside’. Saby was tracked, visited and
interviewed, but neither she, nor Kaye’s family, provided
information that they had seen the fugitive. Like McLane, Kaye was
also written off the Asylum’s books when her sentence expired.

The north
boundary wall on the female side was raised later on in 1869, and
the ground also lowered on the patients’ side. John Meyer had
finally achieved the basic levels of security that would have
prevented most of the escape attempts so far. Though improvements
were still required, never again would there be a lack of basic
confidence in the accommodation provided to Her Majesty’s lunatics.
Unfortunately, Meyer himself would not have a chance to
re-establish the Asylum’s reputation for public safety. His sudden
death, in May 1870, brought to an end his time as Broadmoor’s first
chief of staff. With Orange promoted from deputy, the new Medical
Superintendent immediately began agitating against the convict
‘time’ patients who he saw as the main source of disruptive
behaviour, including escapes. Statistically, he was correct: of the
sixteen patients who had made serious attempts to escape under
Meyer’s tenure, only four were pleasure men. In this second phase
of security development in the Victorian Asylum, then, the
spotlight fell on another element: the lunatics themselves.

***

Dr William
Orange, Broadmoor’s second Medical Superintendent, had been a
member of the staff since the Asylum opened. He had been part of
the establishment that experienced the escape attempts of the early
years, had directly witnessed some of them, and also knew the
history of the protracted improvements to the window bars and
external walls. On John Meyer’s death in May 1870, he inherited an
institution that had passed through an inevitable period of
teething troubles in terms of managing difficult behaviour.

Nevertheless,
it would only be in 1875 that Orange finally felt confident that he
had stemmed what was, admittedly, a gentle trickle of patients
seeping out through the bricks and mortar. Until then, he would
also suffer the indignity of reporting briefly successful escapes
to his superiors on the Asylum’s Council of Supervision and in the
Home Office. That Orange continued initially to fight against
turbulence in flight was partly down to the building, again, and
partly down to Orange’s more mature regime, with greater
responsibilities and privileges placed upon both his patients and
his staff.

During the
early 1870s, though, Orange also strongly believed that many of his
institutional ills could be attributed to the lack of segregation
between his different classes of patient. Orange argued that the
convict class of patient – the ‘time’ patient - was far more
destructive than Her Majesty’s lunatics, the ‘HMPs’ or ‘pleasure
men’ who were detained at Her Pleasure.

Broadmoor had
always taken convicted patients with defined time sentences, and as
we have seen in Part One, statistical evidence from Meyer’s time
suggested that there might be some truth in the proposition that
such patients were more prone to making escape attempts. Orange
also believed that their disruptive influence ran wider than this
narrow problem, with the convicts liable either to wreak havoc on
their own in myriad ways or to corrupt the mostly harmless HMPs. On
top of that, the numbers of both classes of lunatic had grown since
the Asylum opened. By the time that Orange took over, the patient
population at Broadmoor numbered over four hundred and fifty, which
meant that his nursing staff of fewer than one hundred were
significantly outnumbered by those who they were meant to watch.
Around a third of these patients were ‘time’ sentenced, though the
ratio was slightly higher on the male side. As the numbers
continued to grow, Orange’s view was that the potential for
convicts to cause trouble was not diminishing.

Though Orange
felt he had identified the building bricks of trouble, the
potential escapees continued to come from both sides of the
lunatics’ dividing wall. So it was that the first escapee with whom
Orange had to deal was a pleasure man. On a frozen winter’s day,
11th January 1871, a working party of seven patients and two
attendants were labouring to break up the heavy soil in one of the
fields on the Asylum estate, outside the walls. Isaac Finch, a
thirty-one year old farm labourer from rural Essex, was a member of
the group. Just before lunchtime, having finished his work and by
now bitterly cold, Finch asked to be allowed to leave the party to
return to his Block inside. He was given permission to cross a
small bridge which divided the field from the enclosed part of the
estate. Rather than make his way back through the gate, he seized
his opportunity to run, and instead took off into the woods. The
attendant in charge of the party was severely reprimanded. Orange
was frustrated by this further proof that higher security in the
compound could always be circumvented by poor working
practices.

Finch had
entered the Asylum as a married man with five children. Family life
was poor, and the Finches lived only just above the poverty line.
As Finch searched for hope and meaning in his struggle, he had
become captivated by the form of evangelical Christianity preached
by the Peculiar People. Their ministry was an Essex phenomenon, an
offshoot from Wesleyan Methodism that promulgated a literal
interpretation of the King James Bible, including the rejection of
medicine in favour of prayer. The name of the sect was interpreted
as ‘chosen’ rather than ‘odd’.

A religiously
conservative man, one summer day Finch had been found clutching his
Bible - ‘with the leaves turned down at the death of Solomon and
David’, the son and father who, amongst other things, incurred
divine displeasure through their sexual behaviour - and covered in
blood, shortly after his wife’s body was found at their home with
her throat cut. He was acquitted of murder on the grounds of
insanity and arrived in Broadmoor in September 1870.

Now, Orange
had a murderer on the run, and it was only Finch’s lack of
organisation that spared the doctor’s blushes. A pleasure man was,
almost by definition, unaware of the consequences of his actions,
and Finch’s inability to act rationally was to be his undoing.
Walking first to Windsor, then back westwards to Reading, Finch had
turned once more and eventually decided to make for home in Essex.
He tore off some of the Broadmoor labels from his clothing but did
not complete the job, either forgetting to remove the rest or not
identifying the need. Reaching the Capital, and without food or
shelter, an exhausted and hungry Finch asked to be admitted to the
Fulham Workhouse in Hammersmith, where his remaining markers were
noticed by the staff. He was returned to the Asylum only five days
after he left, and the superintendent of the Workhouse’s male ward
for casual paupers found himself one pound better off.

Finch would
enjoy no further change of scene, apart from a regular oscillation
between the blocks at Broadmoor, from refractory to privilege then
back again. He remained industrious, only indoors rather than out,
spending most of his working time in the Asylum cleaning the wards,
even when he was in the ‘back Blocks’. His children remained in
constant contact with him, writing and visiting, until he died from
a brain haemorrhage in March 1900.